Fine art inspired by music often feels like a geeky kid brother trying to tag along with a older sibling and his or her cool friends. Joe Wardwell of Boston (thumbs up to the MFA for including locals) makes it work by imitating the look of rock album covers. Can You Help Me (2007) floats lyrics from Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven — "There's a feeling/I get/When I/Look to the West" — atop an Alfred Bierstadt– esque creek running through a brown forest. Wardwell's sense of typographic design is hit-or-miss, but when his recipe works, the combo of Manifest Destiny American landscapes and bad-ass rock is, uh, more than a feeling.

After Michael Jackson's death on June 25, Panopticon Gallery quickly assembled a show of Joshua Touster's photos of Jackson's 1984 Victory Tour. The Watertown photographer focuses on the fans and the commerce surrounding Jackson, then at the peak of his success after his 1982 album Thriller. The most memorable of the 10 photos here shows two boys in Jacksonville wearing matching sunglasses, studded wristbands, Jackson gloves, and T-shirts saying, "Michaelized in Jacksonville." It's their expressions, their postures: defiant, laid-back, cool. Other photos show a guy in a wheelchair wearing a Thriller hat and shirt, a New Yorker wearing a denim jacket custom-painted with a vision of Jackson, a banner advertising the tour hung on a New York skyscraper, someone opening a wallet to buy a knockoff Jackson glove. These images are more about documenting the phenomenon — the tribe of shared taste, the cult around show-biz idols — than they are great art in and of themselves.

Touster includes just two concert photos, both shot at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles in December 1984. One taken from about halfway back in the crowd depicts Jackson and his brothers as specks amid the stage's megawatt glow. The other shows Jackson flanked by two brothers on the front of the stage. His magnetic confidence makes his siblings look like dorks. He's dressed in a rhinestone cowboy shirt and dark narrow pants with high hems that show off his light socks. He twists his chest toward us, leans his head into the mic in his right hand, cocks his left arm back with the fingers spread wide. He snaps his skinny, slightly bent legs into profile. The spotlights are his halo.

It's a good (not great) shot, poignant because it marks a pivotal point between his success and his failure. Already his nose seems to be thinning. He would have another hit album in 1987's Bad, but soon came child-abuse allegations, the mutating face and skin tone, odd marriages, disconcerting parenting. His death allows us to leapfrog over his man-child, black-white, sordid freak show to this moment when we still could love him unconditionally.

Records are a path to memory in Luxembourg-raised, Berlin-based Su-Mei Tse's Floating Memories installation at the Gardner Museum. A wood platform framing a gold silk rug from China stands raised slightly off the floor. The wood is etched on two sides of the rug and filled with shiny green resin in a peacock and floral wallpaper pattern. Projected on the wall above is video of a record endlessly spinning as we hear the crackle and pop of the needle stuck at the end of the album.

Bon appétit! Luis Meléndez himself greets you at the outset of "Luis Meléndez: Master of the Spanish Still Life" at the Museum of Fine Arts. He seems a haughty 31-year-old in this 1746 self-portrait, standing in a fine silk coat and ruffled shirt and holding up a chalk drawing (note the chalk in his hand) of a hunky nude dude.

The rules of his game Given that every theater season seems to bring a new production of a Chekhov play, it's surprising that so few movies have been made of his dramas, or of his short stories. Or maybe not so surprising: Chekhov is perilously difficult for filmmakers.

Splendor on the screen The arc of Elia Kazan's professional life has its origins in the Group Theatre, where he was trained as an actor and performed in the original 1930s productions of Clifford Odets's Waiting for Lefty and Golden Boy .

States of the art In New England, where you can't swing a sack of cranberries without hitting a venerable cultural institution, anyone with access to a car (or even a subway pass) can scope out these topnotch art museums.

Viva Modernism Long before the threat of swine flu, Mexico was the scene of an outbreak of a very different kind: Modernism.

Mostly noir The definition of film noir has become elastic through the years. Of the five movies included in the MFA’s series “Rialto’s Best of British Film Noir” only two, strictly speaking, are noirs: Brighton Rock, Graham Greene & Terence Rattigan’s adaptation of Greene’s novel, and The Third Man, Greene’s most famous collaboration with the filmmaker Carol Reed.

Art in the air conditioning From Picasso to William "Shrek" Steig's cartoons, and surfer photos to a Twilight Zone toy store, New England offers art worth traveling to this summer. Here we round up the best in the region, no matter the weather or your artistic inclinations.